Category Archives: Managerial

I can say that I am a typical product of the Dutch football school. I grew up with and was influenced by the people who have largely determined the football landscape in the Netherlands: Johan Cruijff, Rinus Michels, Louis van Gaal, Guus Hiddink, Wiel Coerver and Raymond Verheijen. My whole life I am busy with and interested in all topics related to football. Besides being a player and trainer, I have been active as technical director, youth and assistant trainer. Furthermore, as a board member of the CBV, I was responsible for the football technical matters for a number of years. In this capacity I was part of several sounding board groups and the technical platform of the KNVB. Continue reading →

Iwaki FC is a club with a big ambition. The club is completely new and operating for 4 months now. The club had no past, so no history, no culture and no trophies.
To build a professional club you need to have in mind the reason why you want to build such a club and how you want to position it in the present football landscape.
The goal of Iwaki FC is a clear one. We want to build a modern football club that is part of local community. It has to become a magnet for everything that has to do with football. It also has to have a social function that plays a binding part in in the local community. In order to achieve this we started the first initiatives to attract people to our club. It is good to see that the fanbase is slowly growing with every home game. Continue reading →

This article was published in the Japan Times on January 15th.Dome Corporation president Shuichi Yasuda has the vision, Satoshi Okura the know-how and former Dutch international and Rangers player Pieter Huistra the experience. The goal now is to combine their respective talents as they embark on the task of building a professional soccer club from scratch.

Yasuda announced the creation of the new team, Iwaki FC, earlier this week at the Dome Kickoff party at Ariake Coliseum, and he has grand ambitions. He wants the club to become a pillar in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture (among the areas devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011), and ultimately, years, maybe decades down the line, help change Japan’s sporting landscape.

“We would like to energize Japan through sports,” Yasuda said Wednesday. “Well, actually, reform it. When you look at America and European countries such as Germany and Britain, they lead their societies with sports. We’ve looked closely at what they do and we’ve always wanted our society to do the same. We must do it. We’ve talked about this project over the past year and it has materialized.” Continue reading →

I am happy to announce that I have joined Iwaki FC as head coach.
It is a once in a lifetime possibility to be part of such an ambitious project. Since I left Japan as a player 19 years ago it has been a dream to come back to this country to coach.
When I was approached to join the project I did not hesitate to commit. Iwaki FC is a new club supported by Dome Corp, the distributor of the Under Armour label.
It wants to establish itself as a role model club in Japan. Emphasis will be on development of young players. Iwaki FC will take international benchmark as its guide in this development.

At the moment the club has just started to recruit players for the first team and will start at amateur level in the Tohoku region.

The club has a 10 year plan to reach JLeague and build an academy at international level that delivers top level players.

I feel very fortunate to be part of this project that also gives joy to the people of Iwaki who are still in the redevelopment of their city after the tsunami disaster. It gives extra energy to build this club together for a great future.

After exactly one year working in Indonesia I am back in the Netherlands. It has been an interesting, frustrating and learning experience. When I first came there was a lot of energy in the Football Association (PSSI) office. A lot of changes were made over the previous two years to develop football in this football crazy country.
The association brought in two foreigners, Mr. Sivaji and myself, to help develop the sport in Indonesia. Mr. Sivaji is an experienced coach and instructor who is a member of the AFC technical committee.

We concentrated on one of the most important pillars for improvement of football: coach education. In a short period of time we set up a great program for coaches to get their AFC license in Indonesia. There had been a vacuum of 4 years in which the courses were not given or not recognized bij AFC. The new program provided 40 A-, B- and C-AFC courses and 36 National D-courses in 2015. The head coaches participated in the first courses. Many of them had previously followed the national courses which were not recognized bij AFC. Continue reading →